Millburn district, parents puzzle over Common Core tests

Parents poured into the Education Center to hear Millburn school district administrators explain the Common Core State Standards at the May 12 Board of Education meeting. Some were also in the audience of a meeting the next day organized by a grassroots group of township residents.

Although opinions varied at each talk, residents brought up a common issue at both: concerns about new standardized testing.

On May 12, Assistant Superintendent Christine Burton told assembled residents that Common Core was adopted in June 2010 after being created by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers. New Jersey has adopted Common Core language arts and math standards, and all K-12 curriculum in Millburn public school has been aligned to Common Core since last year.

Burton said a major goal of the standards - which are not created by the national government but have been adopted by 44 states - is to make sure students are better equipped for college.

"Students graduated with a diploma, yet sometimes had to take remedial classes," she said. The new guidelines also include having students read and respond to more nonfiction, because "when students go into the work world, more of the literature is informational text.

"We have had standards since the '80s and '90s but states were all creating their own assessments," Burton said. Although the HSPA and NJASK tests New Jersey uses are more than just multiple-choice tests, the new assessments "are going to be much more rigorous."

A performance-based PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) test will be given in March and an end of the year assessment will be administered in May. Time spent testing will be about double the NJASK, approximately eight hours broken up into roughly four hours each in March and May.

Math questions on the new tests will involve multi-step problems in which students must show their work, and language arts questions will require students to delve deeper into texts.

Superintendent of Schools James Crisfield spoke about the implications of the new standards and tests.

"It's our opinion we have not lowered one single Millburn standard because of this," he said, drawing a distinction between standards - which are adopted by states everywhere - and curriculum developed by teachers and administrators at the district level.

However, he said "the sheer number of devices" districts will need to administer PARCC tests is a concern.

"During test day, those devices aren't available for teaching and learning," Crisfield said.

The test will also require more rooms of the building and could displace classes or other activities. Another concern is the number of delayed openings that may be required.

"We can't test everyone in the school at once," he said. For logistical reasons, it's not possible to know how many days will be devoted to testing at this time.

As for the test itself, Crisfield said it will be "higher stakes testing than we currently do now" and "people's attention will be ratcheted up." Students will type their answers directly into the online portal, so they will "need to be adept typists."

Since the test are harder, he said it is also likely that student scores will be lower.

Teachers will be evaluated partly on their students' progress on the tests, and information on students will be collected in the state's database, NJSMART.

Data collection is intended so that trends can be perceived in student needs, but Crisfield said there are still questions yet unanswered, such as whether the data will be on student transcripts or seen by college admissions officers.

From a budgeting perspective, the superintendent said some of the ingredients necessary for PARCC would have been added regardless of the test. The network was upgraded years ago to allow wireless capability, and curriculum is revised every five years, he said.

One of the test-related expenses, however, was $50,000 allocated in the 2014-15 budget for contractors to help test day technology run smoothly.

One danger Crisfield pointed to is the possibility of charter schools and voucher programs to "creep in" as potentially low PARCC scores play into "the idea that public schools are failing."